Southern Comfort
by twitchytwain
Summary: Tensions rise in a small southern town when a Lockwood boy rapes Bonnie's little sister. Matters of race, sex, and class are questioned as the lives of the townsfolk are forver altered. Bonnie faces her own truths in this coming of age story when she meets a clusmsy senior, Damon Salvatore who's seeking his own adventure amidst the chaos. Loosely based on the movie "A Time to Kill"
1. Chapter 1

_**A/N: Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…I hope you enjoy this chapter!**_

_**Summary: Tensions rise in a small town in Georgia when a little girl's rape alters the lives of its townsfolk. **_

_**A/U: Bonnie Bennett is a sixteen year old who has been friends with Tyler Lockwood since that time they had mumps together. This friendship is tested when Tyler's brother-ah shucks, just read the fic lol. Emily is Bonnie's little sister, Marcel and Jamie are her brothers. Damon is eighteen and a senior who's preparing for college and Stefan is also sixteen. Giuseppe Salvatore features as the father and Silas is their grandfather. This fic is loosely based on 'A Time to Kill'/ 'To Kill a Mockingbird' /'What's eating Gilbert Grape'**_

_**Disclaimer: There might be scenes of violence, sex and strong language in this fic…**_

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**The Carnage of Butterflies**

**#**

It was always hot in Georgia but Mystic falls simmered; it grew so hot that even the hissing air caused blisters, sores all over your flesh from the cloying heat. It burned so much that the heat just about turned your innards out.

Bonnie took a long pull from her Coca-Cola, and then cradled the bottle tracing the perspiration running down the glass with her bruised thumb. Her thumb still hurt from her last fishing injury with the boys. She'd snagged it around a hook when she tried to haul up a monster catfish two weeks back.

Wiping an oily hand across her mouth, Bonnie screwed her eyes to the shimmering horizon. She tugged the denim straps of her dungaree, toying with the notion of noodling with Tyler Lockwood but swiftly decided against it. Tyler had been acting mighty strange since his father was let off work. The mill plant was closing down, something about some big cooperation buying it out and turning the place into some big resort for rich townsfolk. They were going to give all their employees nice hefty packages and Bonnie figured that Tyler would be happy, after all the Lockwood's needed the money. They might even buy a nice house with all that money and finally move out of the trailer park Tyler hated.

Bonnie sighed, rocking in her chair before taking another gulp of her coke.

She'd been fighting with Tyler Lockwood ever since they were little, seemed all they did was fight and make up. Marcel liked to tease that she'd been adopted cause she was black on the outside but all red on the inside. Redneck like them Lockwood's, he'd say. The last fight she'd had with Tyler was something brutal though, he'd sat on the rusty hood of his old battered truck, sipping a big ol' can of beer and called her daddy a coward. He'd called Rudy Hopkins a coward for being discharged from the army because of an injury. What the heck did Tyler Lockwood know about being a hero, all him and his brothers ever did was run amok around town shooting beer bottles off trash cans or running up to the creek to fire at innocent squirrels.

This particular insult toward her father was even worse than Tyler's previous lie about her momma being locked up in a mental hospital somewhere in Savannah. Abby Bennett was off in Hollywood somewhere, trying to make a name for herself. Bonnie had the postcards to prove it and as soon as her momma came right, she'd leave this drenched old town and join her in glamorous Hollywood. Bonnie could scarcely remember her mother but she remembered the idea of her and that idea had grown into a memory, a strong work of fiction. She would never allow him to take that away from her. She loathed Tyler Lockwood worse than pigs in a muddy pen.

As far as she was concerned their friendship was finished, dead and buried.

"Bonnie, is Emily back yet?"

"Is she lost?" she asked, nonchalant as she swatted a whining mosquito. Her grams liked to fret and make mountains out of moles, spin fables from thin air and at sixteen, Bonnie was past the charm.

"She went down to the grocery store to buy some of that liquorice she likes"

"I aint seen her"

Grams hesitated, latching on to the torn screen door and looking out toward the supine vista with its stuttering heat.

"Where are the boys?"

"Jamie's out in the henhouse huntin for snakes, don't know about Marcel, probably playing ball by himself again" Bonnie replied, inspecting as the last of the ice dissolved inside the steamed bottle. She shook it once before chugging it down again. Marcel was obsessed with football, fixated on getting a scholarship to Alabama the following year. Their father didn't have the heart to tell him they only picked three blacks a season and that his chances were slim to none.

Everyone was leaving, everybody wanted to run away.

"Have you fed them pigs?" her grams asked, dusting flour off her weathered green apron.

"Yeah, I fed 'em" she flung the words, wiping her mouth on her greasy arm.

"Miss Bennett?"

"Yes mam, I fed 'em hogs"

"Thank you"

"I'll get the boys to go out there and look for Emily"

"I'm comin with, "Bonnie yelled, bouncing from her chair. Being stationary in all that heat was beginning to drive her crazy.

The three of them loaded up into the truck, Marcel driving, Jamie perched up in the passenger seat while Bonnie slouched down in the backseat. The old pick up, rocked and bounced along the old dirt road peppered with gravel. They drove along a labyrinth of red dust roads, past whitewash houses and the old Mikaelson grocery store. Bonnie sighed in the backseat, dropping deeper into the scratched leather seat while she watched the town from the car's murky window. They passed a two mile long mudhole with big serpentine trees rising out of its muddled water, green moss casing its surface like a ratty blanket.

She loved Mystic Falls with its big oak trees sprouting from the ground up like the corpses of former slaves, as her grams would say and the Spanish moss that bloomed and draped over them was their spirits. Sometimes she'd watch as the tendrils of weeping moss swayed in the hot July breeze, she'd imagine they were humming, reciting some old folktale to her. Their ghosts were still tied to this world by the roots running deep down into the fat soil, still tied to Georgia and never wanting to let her go. When Bonnie was younger the idea spooked her, the dead were always watching, they never left.

xXx

Everything burned, the heat breathed into his face before eating him alive, spitting him out and leaving him a wilted thing. Damon was sapped from the sagging heat and draining his father's single malt seemed to only aggravate the problem. He couldn't wait for the ensuing year, couldn't wait to escape Mystic Falls and head off to India. His father was still under the assumption that he was heading off to Harvard to study law. Damon didn't have the belly to disappoint him, to tell him that he would never be part of the Salvatore line of prestigious attorney's.

Damon dropped on the bench beside his brother, Stefan Salvatore, the great white hope. They sat under a canopy of thick, twisted branches with obscure rays of golden sunshine dripping through its cracks.

"How about this heat?"

"Yeah"

Stefan slid a piece of blotting paper under his scrawling hand to stop his sweat from smudging his sketch of the plantation.

"It's enough to make a man do anything" Damon said tossing his head back to see the birds perched higher up the thicker branches. They startled in the distilled air, breaking off into a loud clatter. Damon would not miss all these lifeless afternoons.

At sixteen, Stefan envisioned himself as an artist but Damon knew that his younger brother was more like his father, though he would never admit to it. Damon could read Stefan's future and he didn't even need tea leaves to do it. Stefan was going to become a fine attorney, marry a nice blonde girl and have a million babies to replicate the Salvatore formula. Damon's dream was far simpler, India and breathing.

He breathed everything in for a moment, swirling the whiskey around his mouth and grinding the cool ice with his teeth. His eyes sailed over the antebellum plantation, tangled moss dipping into the silvery water of the lake.

"You ever considered this place could be haunted?" Damon asked.

"What, Wildwind?"

"No, Stefan, I'm talking about Arizona" he said, rolling his blue eyes "Yes, Wildwind, the estate. Have you ever wondered if it could be haunted?"

"Lord knows how many confederate army soldiers must be buried out there," Damon continued with a shrug before adding, "not to mention the slaves"

Stefan's brows furrowed and he narrowed his green eyes at Damon. Heat hung motionless, seething moist over the vast green estate.

"Early signs of psychosis, Doctor Salvatore?"

Damon smirked; shrugging his shoulder before taking a swig of whisky.

"It's an interesting theory; I mean momma's buried out there too"

Stefan shifted uncomfortably in his seat, tossing a sodden tissue and plunging his hand inside his pocket for a fresh one. Again, he placed it under his sketching hand and began drawing again. Stefan disliked talking about their momma, her death or her life. He liked to keep the memory of her buried deep inside his alabaster box, buried inside with all his secrets.

"Have you told daddy that you want to study medicine, not law?"

"I haven't even told _daddy _my name, I scarcely think he cares to know what it is" Damon replied, running a sweaty hand through his raven hair. Stefan raised a quirky eyebrow at him then shook his head. Damon knew how stark raving mad he sounded, most days he didn't make sense and sometimes he barely made sense even to himself.

"You're running away" Stefan said softly, his eyes fixed on the paper.

"It's not running away when you're running toward something brother, "he toyed with his drink "black sheep never run Stefan, they simply fade. This time next year, I'll be tucked away in your pretty box. Right next to momma"

A breeze startled Stefan's papers, a whirl of flying paper ripping the torpid air as Stefan raced after the sheets. Damon looked up to find their grandfather, Silas, standing still by an open window observing them.

He jerked up from the bench and without much thought, he raised his glass to salute the old man.

xXx

Bonnie's heart knocked hard against her chest when the truck turned onto their rutted gravel driveway, a pounding that roared in her ears as Marcel wheeled them closer to the patrol car. A small crowd littered the front steps, huddled, a cacophony of hushed voices ringing in Bonnie's ears. Her brothers bounded up the stairs while she sought each step, feeling the weight of her shoes on the concrete. Her toes creaked inside the leather, new shoes she was still breaking in for church.

When Bonnie opened the screen door she heard the cries, hushed wails inside the house, a shuttered lounge that was as hot as a furnace. Kinsfolk and neighbours scattered around the room, everyone breathing into each other and breathing for each other. It felt like a tomb. Faint dust rose sluggishly around her feet, spinning with slow motes in a gash of sunlight and Bonnie crept closer to the room's focal point.

"What happened?" she whispered with a wobbly voice, Jamie was screaming something awful and Marcel was somewhere hidden in the crowd, rigid and stifling all his rage inside. Grams was caught between wiping the blood from Emily's face and fanning her with the sopping cloth and so she did both. Then Bonnie noticed her father bent over her younger sister, hand shakily brushing Emily's swollen face. The urgent beating of Bonnie's heart only hastened as she crouched down beside the couch next to her father.

"Daddy" Bonnie cried, listening to her father's panting, breathing and sniffling. Emily was bloody to her feet, greasy and bloodied and smelling of urine and beer. Someone murmured that Emily had been found sprawling in the middle of some dirt road next to a fishing spot, bleeding and hurt.

The ambulance came sometime before dusk, high pitched sirens that shattered the brittle air. Everyone was tense from waiting and emotions were beginning their lofty spirals, hurt, sorrow but pulsating rage was the liveliest of them all. Bonnie clung to Marcel's overalls as they carried Emily out on a stretcher. Emily stirred under the blanket, reaching out for Rudy's hand and he snatched her thin wrist and held on to her. Bonnie grabbed her father's coat off the coat hanger and rushed out toward the door where the crowd was beginning to pour out of the house.

"No" Marcel cried, fastening his hand around Bonnie's elbow but she jerked her arm free, wrenching the screen door open. She ran, weaving and staggering through the crowd.

"Daddy, Daddy!" she shouted, crossing the rutted driveway.

"Stay here, Bonnie" he motioned toward the house while he took the coat she gave him "We'll be back soon" he assured her. Bonnie looked over his shoulder, her grams was softly tucking Emily's hair behind her ears, talking quietly to her and Emily's eyes were wet and swollen shut.

"We'll be back soon" her father repeated before the paramedics closed the ambulance doors.

xXx

The ceiling fan stirred above the table, doing nothing to elevate the stale rancid air hanging above them. The house was a pretty cage with heavy burgundy drapes, lamps that came alive only in the evenings to sputter and sway in comradery with the clanking of decorated silver cutlery. Their grandfather called it tradition, Damon called in dinner in hell.

"The Lockwood boy and his friend have been arrested -"Alaric paused, swallowing his crawfish "raped a little black girl up there near Demon's creek"

"Jesus, is she okay?"

"She's still in hospital, " Alaric sipped his red wine "critical, they say"

"How old is she?"

"Ten"

"It's that Bennett girl, the young one" Alaric said chewing slowly.

"Rudy Hopkins's girl?" Giuseppe asked, shaggy brows springing up "I know Rudy, he's a good man" he finally affirmed, eating steadily, careful not to grind his chicken bones.

"Are you a nigger-lover, boy?" Silas slurred, blundering into the table before mopping his face with a monogramed napkin "I never raised no nigger-lover" he snapped. Damon boldly watched as his grandfather staggered like an uncoordinated skeleton, stiff, white and highly intoxicated.

"I just said I knew the man, and I do feel sorry for him" Giuseppe quickly defended himself, reclaiming his manhood from his father.

"Jesus, its rape of a minor" Damon's voice cracked, eyes glaring at the clots in the peppered tomato soup with meatballs bobbing inside the brass bowl.

"Rape is rape; don't matter if she a forty year old black woman or white woman!" Caroline, Stefan's special friend suddenly spoke up, the pink ribbons in her flaxen hair fluttering.

"It takes a whole new meaning when it's a child though, doesn't it?"

"Takes a whole new meaning if the girl dies too"

"Capital murder" Giuseppe confirmed with a nod, stripping the cellophane off his packet of cigarettes. He lit one and began to cough.

"Can they get bond for Capital murder?" Stefan blinked at his father.

"This is Mystic Falls son, anything can happen"

"I tell you what, if 'em boys post bond, we could have another civil war in our hands"

"Good, I'll be right there to remind them niggers that this is the damn south!"

"Y'all are forgettin what this is about, " Caroline pounced again, " that family must be goin through somethin awful." She said, the glint in her blue eyes regarded by the rest of the party. Damon liked this one, Stefan had been involved with countless faces, all interchangeable ever since he was fourteen and Damon had reckoned that they were partial to his artistic demeanour. He really liked this one, he liked her tenacity and enduring spirit. Most importantly, Damon liked her because Silas detested her.

Damon guzzled his entire glass of wine before slamming it on the table. Godammit, he wished something would happen, something to yank them all out of the tediousness of their laborious days. He prayed for something to happen, something to toss him upside down, burn him deep from the inside and quench his deep need for adventure.

"I wish somethin would happen" he heard himself say, his voice sounding recklessly mirthful.


	2. Chapter 2

**Things we collected**

**#**

Bonnie's stream of consciousness came in half sentences, dribbles that wandered off to Emily. Emily swinging up in a tyre swing, Emily's silver giggles as Bonnie braided her hair, Emily reciting her multiplication table in the shaded porch, Emily running around their kitchen covered in flour and Emily starring up at Bonnie all bright-eyed while she read her the story of the frog prince.

Her sister had been raped. They'd ripped the innocence right off her poor spirit. She'd never be the same again. Those monsters had taken EVERYTHING from her.

The pork hissed and spluttered in the pan and Marcel leaned against the cupboard, arms crossed against his big broad chest. Bonnie bunched in the kitchen chair, knees drawn up against her slight chest with her arms wrapped tightly around them. She listened to the thud of Jamie's boots as he paced the length of the small room, his knife scraping the skin off a ripe red apple.

They were all quiet, waiting silently for that phone call from grams or their father . Bonnie thought this is what it must be like, waiting for Armageddon. She bowed her head into her knees and prayed silently.

Then the phone rang in the hallway and Marcel sprinted for it, leaving Jamie scrambling behind.

"One of 'em Lockwood boys?"

She heard Marcel scream as she turned the meat on the stove and dropping the fork, she bounded for the lit foyer where her brothers were huddled.

"What about 'em Lockwood boys? "she asked as Marcel hung up the phone.

"_They _raped our sister!" he snapped, punching the wall and belching out a howl so deep that Bonnie could see the dark caverns of his throat. He sprang forward again, clawed a vase from the table and hurled it against the same wall.

"Tried to kill her too, they _did_ leave her out there to die!" he broke, hissing through his teeth.

"No, Marcel…" she gulped hot air, her heart pounding hard against her ribs "not Tyler, he wouldn't-" she shook her head, retreating back toward the couch.

"It's not Tyler, it's that other one, that older one, Mason" he yelled turning on the television and there it was, the story in vibrant colour, Emily's picture and Mason Lockwood's name along with Malachai Laughlin's name running across the bottom of the T.V. screen.

"Turn it off, Marcel" she cried bitterly.

"Tyler's just as bad as his skank of a brother" Jamie

"The whole lot is rotten to the core, damn rednecks"

"Marcel, what'cha ya doin?" she asked as he slipped on his coat "where you off to?"

"I'm goin down to that police station and I'm goin see about a damn redneck"

"What ya mean, see about the redneck?"

"I'm goin 'fix him , that's what I mean" he vowed, his mouth curled in disgust.

"I'm comin wit'cha" Jamie said, skipping off to retrieve his own jacket.

"Where's daddy's rifle?" Bonnie cried looking from one brother to the other.

"Don't do nothin foolish, y'all hear!" she yelled as the boys rushed out of the house in a rustle of coats and hammering boots.

Hesitantly, she switched on the television again and Emily's face was everywhere. She listened as the white woman with a cultured voice and straw-coloured hair said something about a preliminary hearing for Mason Lockwood and his friend. Frantically, she switched to another channel but her sister's face was everywhere. The stations were using her schoolbook picture, the one with her big cherubic cheeks, great glossy eyes and bouncy pigtails. Bonnie promptly switched off the T.V.

The silence seemed to go on forever before she heard the faraway roar of an approaching vehicle. Ragged red light leaped up and flooded the porch and Bonnie broke cover and made for the door. Slowly, she unfastened the rusted old bolts and cracked the screen door open, peering outside. She looked over her shoulder at the empty house before stepping out into the lit porch.

Bonnie glared at the pair of churning lights like a deer caught in headlights. The vehicle bounced, skewering and smacking against the rocks as it surged up the jagged gravel driveway.

It was Tyler Lockwood's battered truck.

Bonnie waited, watching the truck as leaping fireflies rode her sunbaked skin. She watched as Tyler's silhouette moved inside the car and she took tentative steps across the porch. Her eyes followed Tyler's vague shape as he climbed out of the truck, a can of beer in his hand.

She advanced toward him, hands buried deep inside the back pockets of her dungaree.

"What devil train rode ya over?" she asked noticing his bloody nose.

"There's a heated mob of black boys tryna hustle us back at the trailer park, "he huffed dabbing gingerly at his nose with his wet cuff.

"You wanna come inside so I can take a look at it?" she asked, reaching out to touch his dripping nose but he flinched back.

"Nah, ya know I caint do tha'"

"Yup, bad idea!" she withdrew her hands, handing them on either side of her hips, fingers itching.

"Y'all know my brother's innocent, don't ya?" Tyler narrowed his eyes down at her "You's fixin to embarrass us, is that it?" he raised his eyebrows, snorting back as he wiped his nose on his plaid sleeve.

"How's my sister gettin raped humiliatin' ya?"

"Cause my brother never touch' her and y'all know it!" he shook his head, waggling a gnarled finger at her "Ya'll wanna see my momma wobblin all over town tryna fix a case for Mason? Ya'll know she aint left the house in years on account of her condition" he breathed heavy, fisting his dark hair.

"Why, cause she fat? Pry her out of the godamn trailer 'en" Bonnie fastened her hands on her hips, her face closing in on his "My sister's gettin her justice, Tyler and there aint nothin y'all can do about it!"

"But y'all know Mason. He used to give y'all piggy back rides from school, remember that?"

"Folks change Tyler, you did. 'Never thought you'd be on my front porch, drunk as a skunk and tellin me my kid sister's a big stinking liar after she'd been hurt like that?"

"Oh ya can huff and puff all you want, I aint budgin!" she screamed, stomping her right foot hard on the ground, the pain shooting up her leg like an adrenaline shot.

"So it's like that then?" he asked squeezing the tears back, jaw muscles bucking to force the waterworks to retract.

"It's like that!" Bonnie exclaimed, chin jutted out and arms crossed firmly against her heaving chest.

xXx

Damon wheeled the ladder swiftly along the glazed black-walnut bookshelves.

He plucked out a ratty copy of Doctor Moreau's island, the anthropologist. He loved the musty smell of the library even though the housekeepers cleaned it diligently; they never seemed to be able to quell the scent of old books and the lingering scent of his grandfather's cigar. The library had always been Damon's favourite place in the house; it was his portal to a myriad of other worlds. As kids, Stefan had always had his art and Damon, his adventures which he'd found in the numberless books.

"What do you think is going to happen now?" Stefan inquired, settling the stolen sherry decanter on the vast table littered with disorganized books.

"They'll rape one of our own" Damon announced, hopping down from the ladder "An eye of an eye, right?" he slurred, diving for the bottle. He opened the flask, lifted it up and took four hefty swallows out of it.

"Don't be silly, Damon" Stefan exclaimed, shaking his head.

"I'm not being silly, I'm being a realist"

"You're starting to sound just like the old coot" he creased his brows, referring to their grandfather, whom had many nicknames thanks to Damon, the giver of monikers.

"The old coot is as crazy as a bat, I simply subscribe to the concept of revenge"

"Revenge?"

"Yes, Stefan. Revenge, a dish best served very cold" he said " many a book have dissected the theory of revenge, idealized the poetry of it. It's a formula I strongly subscribe to"

"This aint about race Damon, you said it yourself, it's about the rape of a minor"

"Did y'all hear the debate in there? This is the south brother. Every damn fight's about race"

"The south brother, " he affirmed," most of them folks have their heads buried so far up their asses, they wouldn't know justice if it smacked them in the face!"

"I don't agree"

"Enough about politics, let's talk…sex!" Damon announced, waggling his dark eyebrows.

"Caroline and I are none of your business" Stefan teased, blood mounting up his cheeks.

"Come now, is this the virgin talkin or has she finally helped you with that?"

"I have a better idea," he simpered, smoothing back his sandy-brown hair "let's discuss Harvard and daddy!"

"How about this?" Damon asked, fingering out a pamphlet from his back pocket. He unfolded the piece of shabby paper and laid it out on the littered table.

"Anthropology?"

"It's an anthropology program in India, that's where I'm goin next year" Damon smirked "if I can get in, that is"

"What about medicine?"

"That'll happen, this is just something I'm tryin out"

Stefan shook his head, Damon was always trying something out. He never actually committed to anything.

"So, how you gonna get in?"

"With a killer thesis"

"Well don't leave me dangling, "Stefan exclaimed "what you writing about?"

"Mystic Falls and its killer tribes" Damon replied, bowing with a flourish.

Stefan shook his head and started tackling the sherry, his face wearing a pained grimace the entire time.

xXx

The rooster woke her up first before her alarm. Bonnie kicked the quilt and wrestled with the tangled sheets.

Tucking her untidy curls inside a baseball cap, she dragged it lower into her face just so only the tip of her nose and quirky, plump lips were showing. Limbs heavy with sleep, she staggered down the hall through the kitchen where her grams was already heating up some grits for breakfast.

"Morning, child"

"Yes, mam" she replied, snatching the egg basket as she sauntered out of the house. The sun was hot on her back, tee-shirt clinging to her shoulders and it wasn't even proper daybreak. Bonnie peeked inside the henhouse before reaching under the hen to grope a big warm egg.

"You're the other Bennett girl, aint ya?"

Her hand, froze over the eggs as she glared at the man. His cigarette wreathed its faint cloud across her face. He stood in the middle of the shrubbery, trees thinning against a pale green sky.

"Get off our property," she sneered, her eyes squinting against the smoke.

"Technically, I'm not on your property, " he said above the clucking of hens, the cigarette dangling between his chapped lips "I'm behind this here fence" he smirked, looping his forefingers around the jigsaw wire, trilling it with a shake.

"You're a reporter?"

"Yes, mam"

"Then git off our property, we don't want' any of y'all here"

Bonnie had seen it before, media harassment. She'd been privy to it when someone leaked Tyler's momma's picture to the press and they came to see the town's heaviest woman. They had viewed her like one might view a bleached whale at an aquarium or a hippopotamus at the zoo. She didn't want any of that for her family or her beloved sister.

Crack! Boom! Crack! Boom! Crack! Boom!

Bonnie whirled around to the noise behind her, a scream in her throat as Marcel fired another shot in the air before corking the rifle again.

"You heard my sister, now git!"

The reporter stalled, palms raised up as he looked from Bonnie to Marcel then back to Bonnie. Clumsily, he began to draw back, trampling the ground and snapping a few twigs. The siblings kept their eyes fixed on him, Marcel's hands firmly around the rifle. When she was sure that he was gone and upon hearing the sound of his bleating automobile, Bonnie exhaled.

"It's goin be like this from now on, aint it?" She asked Marcel as he wound his arm around her shoulder.

"Yup, like buzzards at a mule's funeral" he murmured, resting his chin on her head.

X

The courtroom deputy led the judge to the bench and the crowd's hushed voiced seemed to rise a volume or two in anticipation of the proceedings.

"All rise for the court" the courtroom deputy yelled and everyone muted.

Rudy Hopkins's knees creaked as he rose to his feet with a slight groan and the judge took his seat on the bench. Mason Lockwood and Malachai were ushered into the courtroom, handcuffed and the mob craned their necks backward to get a better look at them. Their handcuffs were removed and they sat next to defending lawyer, anxiously looking around the room at all the black faces.

Bonnie turned her blurry eyes from the two rapists and scanned the opposite side of the courtroom. The deputies watched nervously, hands lingering above their pistols as they scrutinized the sea of black faces.

Bonnie held her gram's hand, her gram's lace glove coarse against Bonnie's moist palm. With her left hand, Bonnie laced her fingers with her father's wiry, calloused fingers. His hands were hardened, the palms faded into yellow like an over washed cloth. He was a carpenter; he'd been building things ever since Bonnie could remember. Her father had even erected Marcel's shabby cottage outback behind the house so he could have a little privacy now that he was a senior. Rudy was sitting perfectly still, hunched over and staring blankly at his shoes. Bonnie had managed to iron his flannel shirt for him which made him seem virile, manly and unflinching although he didn't look it. Rudy Hopkins looked defeated.

xXx

When the hum of voices in the courtroom began to buzz like bees trapped in a mason jar, Damon tore his gaze away from the Bennett family. He snapped his head toward the direction of the noise, the immensely obese Mrs Lockwood was slowly making her way down the aisle with her younger son, Tyler Lockwood.

He heard the low-toned comments of bewilderment and awe behind him. The stunned crowd watched with disgusted amusement as the elephant in a shingled red dress shuffled down the walkway with a slouched gait. Every so often she'd pause, mammoth chest heaving and lean against a flushed Tyler then proceed with her scuffle.

Mystic Falls had always seemed like Doctor Moreau's island to him, filled with unnatural beasts and inhuman monsters. It was swarming with creatures that deemed themselves cultured simply because they followed the old laws set by their forefathers, an even more outrageous beast. Nothing had evolved in the town, he thought as his eyes roved the muggy courtroom. The whites were on one side and the blacks on the other, even though the hearing was about the grotesque rape of a ten year old girl. The simple matter was and would always be the fact that she was black, it didn't matter that the year was two thousand and three.

Damon scowled into the sunlight as clumps of people crawled outside into the blazing heat of the swarming streets.

The camera crews, T.V broadcasting vans and reporters were all blocking his sight from his new obsession. He weaved around the chanting crowd, his ears slaughtered by the roar of their shouting and clapping. He dropped his head as he dipped past their flailing giant posters, his fingers combing through his thick dark curls. A deputy officer was holding a loudspeaker ordering the crowd to stand back away from the court.

"No bail, no bail!" the crowd chanted, taunting the nervous police. Damon swerved right toward the parking to find his car and there they were, the Bennett family.

The girl kept tugging at the hem of her sleek black dress, tight enough for her buttocks to jerk from side to side as she took small steps behind her brothers. She had removed her chunky shoes and was carrying them in her hands. Glancing backwards at him, her green met his eyes. Damon licked his dry lips, thinking of something to say and she tucked back a strand of hair licking her damp forehead. Somehow this made him focus on her eyes a little bit more. They glared at him through a curtain of long eyelashes and they were green, as green the sprightly grasshoppers him and Stefan used to chase after during their long summer holidays with their momma.

Damon caught the biggest breath of his life, so deep that one might have though he was preparing to dive into the damn Mississippi.

xXx

Bonnie's feet were aching badly; she was damn near walking along the hot pavement with two bludgeoned steaks for feet. Everyone was walking too darn fast and there were reporters everywhere and the crowds, the swarming crowds that made it look like another million men march. She had resolved to take the shoes off cause she couldn't take the shooting pain anymore but somehow, her feet seemed worse off.

She tugged at her Sunday dress, trying to duck her head from the flashing cameras and then she noticed him. He was strange white boy, leaning against a vintage model Rolls Royce with its black hood gleaming in the searing July sun. He teased his wild dark hair with one hand, face flushed red from the heat and lips poised into what appeared to be a smile but was recklessly bordering into a grimace. His eyes were as blue as that artificial fly down at Luke's bait shop, the one no one ever bought cause it only worked with fly fishing. Her daddy had told her once that the hand tied artificial flies were used to lure fish out of fresh water, provoked them to strike.

Fly fishing had no place in Georgia, just like his blue eyes had no right looking at her the way they were looking at her at that very moment.

"What'cha gawkin at?" Bonnie yelled at him, fists balled up at her side.

"C'mere, Let's git" Marcel snapped, winding his fingers around her arm with one hand, the other clamped on her shoulder.

Bonnie's family ran toward their parked vehicles, her hands firmly wrapped around her brother's hand as the crowd swelled. The mob grew, swarming the tarred roads and rocking moving vehicles in all that sweltering heat. They were chanting, shouting, police dogs barking and then someone fired teargas.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: Thank you so much for the reviews and the notes about the realism of this fic, all your reviews are so greatly appreciated.**

**#**

**Talk about Revolution, Its Independence Day**

**#**

Hordes of people tore around the littered streets, screams cutting around them. The blue truck surged inside the swollen current of the crowd, swirling gas rising and eating everything in its path. Marcel' s hands were fastened around the steering wheel, twisting and spinning the wheel as he tried to plough around the masses. Jamie's head lolled to the side, blood trickling from his nose to Bonnie's sploshed arm as she tried to secure his head back onto the head rest. Some over-zealous officer had struck him in the head in all the frenzy, or maybe it had been a T.V camera from one of the frenzied reporters, she couldn't be sure and it didn't matter. Her brother was hurt, they were all hurt.

"Jamie, you got to stay up" she cried, shaking him roughly. Fumbling blindly with tears streaming down her soiled cheeks, she squeezed the back of his neck. Everything was burning from the teargas. Her eyes burned deep into their sockets, her nose was dripping a darn river and her skin was burning so badly, it felt like fire ants were crawling all over her arms and legs.

She threw her squinted eyes behind her to see his father's red Buick crawling through the waves of people, it buoyed like a lifeboat in an ebbing sea and the crowd was gripping on to it.

"We got to git Jamie to the hospital" Bonnie yelled above the commotion.

"Naw, I'll be right as rain in a minute, just wanna go home is all" he shrugged a shoulder petulantly, pushing her nagging hands off him.

Marcel whirled back around trying to find a way out of the wild mob that had hemmed the cars in. There were faces, endless faces choking inside the smoke; they rocked the automobiles, tugged furiously at the doors and slapped the sweaty car windows with their greasy palms. The crowd was panicked, running and crawling on their bellies in an effort to run from the teargas, to flee the whistle of rubber bullets that were soaring over their heads.

xXx

Damon woke up to a sense of sweat trickling down the back of his neck; he was greasy and hot inside his grandfather's Rolls Royce, smothered inside the antique car. Gingerly, he reached his shaky hand to the back of his neck to pry the shirt sticking to his nape.

His fingers came back wet, red and oily. It wasn't sweat leaching down his collar, it was blood. His heart startled in his chest when he realized that someone was bashing his window with a weapon. Damon blinked owlishly, raking a hand through his matted hair and coming back with more blood. He was hot and cold, clothes crumpled and soiled as he rolled down the window tentatively with a lick of his salted bloody lips.

"Salvatore, you right there, son?" the deputy officer scrutinized him, peering around inside the steamed car.

"Yes, sir" Damon garbled, still not quite sure how badly he'd been hurt. He recalled little except for grasshoppers and the colour green.

"You okay to drive home?" The deputy officer inquired, raw sunlight slanting across his features making him look like a cartoon character. He looked like a character in the comic books Stefan used to read when they were little, mouthing out the dialogue while he leafed through the book with crumpled eyebrows.

"Yeah, I think so" Damon mumbled, his inflamed face puckered against the sun and the thinning teargas.

"I can escort you if you like?"

"Naw, thanks officer" he waved him off with his hand before starting the engine.

"I know your granddaddy, "the deputy officer grinned, fingering his belt and hoisting up his sooty khaki trousers "he a good man" he said, beaming and pressing his hips closer to the grimy door.

"Aint he though?" Damon toyed with him as he swerved the steering wheel "I'll tell his ass you sent your greetins" he yelled, rushing past the hulking man. Running his eyes over the street, Damon measured the aftereffects of the small riot. Tangled clumps of people gathered around wailing ambulances, hunched and bleeding like soldiers deep in wet rat infested trenches. The journalist were still lurking around, limping and haemorrhaging but hoisting their cameras and their microphones trying to get that money shot. Mystic Falls was finally alive and finally, so was he.

He left down and bounded for the old plantation, Wildwind. He drove through a tunnel of trees that leaned toward each other, knobby branches interlaced like old crooked fingers creating a long channel like the belly of river serpent. He winced at the chinks of raw sunlight cutting through tangled branches and purple foliage. His eyes were hurting and he felt red, raw and ragged all over.

X

Flowering Wisteria smothered the walls, dense leaves flung down a thick shade on the winding veranda. Silas was sprawled on a sofa against a pile of embroidered silk cushions listening to Strauss's _Morgen. _

Damon's bare feet shuffled on the Persian rug covering the floorboards before he tossed himself on the sofa opposite his grandfather. His blue eyes took in the muggy heat of the lush green garden scattered with fat little sandstone cherubs and the smell of gardenias was intoxicating in the oppressive heat.

"Thank you, Annabelle" Silas grinned, tapping her flecked hand as one would pat an old, mangled dog.

"Yes, sir" the old woman grinned, baring her white teeth to their black roots.

Annabelle had been with his family for years, likewise her mother and her mother before that. She wasn't a slave, Giuseppe had endlessly assured the boys but Damon often wondered why Annabelle never left. He pondered why anyone would be so resolute and proverbially loyal to a family like his, a family of former slave owners.

"You feelin better?" Silas asked, observing him with his filmy blue eyes, their creased eyelids sketched with blue veins like a fishermen's net.

"Yeah"

"Heard about you going down to that courthouse" he announced, studying him intently for a moment.

"Did you now?"

As Damon replied coolly with an air of sheer delight, Giuseppe rushed into the covered veranda in flapping seersucker jackets and whipping needlepoint ties. He was white with rage, feet striking the floorboards as he stomped with a determined gait toward the pair.

"What the heck were you doin down at that courthouse today?" he snapped at his son like a dog chastising its young "you tryin to git yourself killed?"

"I had every right to be there" Damon reasoned, stirring slowly at his sweet tea.

"Damon, how you choose to tickle your own fancy is your own-" he began slowly as if groping for the right words, the right way to frame the lecture he was tending to his wild son.

"I was there to observe the hearing, aint that what you want? " Damon challenged with a shrug of his shoulders, shooting his father a glance from the rim of his cup "I was there observing as a lawyer" he smirked, baiting him.

"Not with this trial, son" his father shook his head, checking his pockets for a lighter "it's too dangerous" he fingered his blazer pocket , pulled out a packet of cigarettes and plucked one out.

"And now with them boys securing a bail hearing and all these damn reporters crawling around everywhere like newly spawned maggots-well-"Giuseppe shook his head imperceptibly lighting his cigarette.

He began to cough deep chesty seizures before Silas said, "You fight like a gator, don't you boy? "His airy blue eyes fixed on Damon while Giuseppe seized his coughing, barks sliding into groans.

"You're more like me than you realize, son" Silas grinned, thrusting a sparkling glass of whisky into his grandson's hand.

"I'm nothin like you, ol' man" Damon replied, lips writhed into a snarl then he hesitated before taking the glass "I'm nothing like any of y'all" he declared with a pained scowl, gulping down the revivifying shot.

xXx

Three days had passed and the townsfolk were still gassing on about the courthouse incident. You had some folks talking about how Martin Luther King wouldn't be too darn happy about the new turn of events, how the country needed a president like Bill Clinton again to charm the folks right on to the Promised Land. Then you had some folks talking about how people needed to rein in them niggers, how terrorism was ruining the country and destroying the South. Folks were growing scared and the bombings in Iraq weren't helping any. They had sons and daughters out there in the desert fighting the war and here they were, back home fighting their own war. All the talk was about as useful as a trap door in a canoe when it came to Bonnie. All she cared about was Emily getting out of that hospital and coming back home.

"Well I'll be darned!" Jamie exclaimed, eyes flung toward his sister as she climbed down the timber stairs" you in a floral dress?"

"Go on, quit your gawkin!"

"You tryna look pretty for all 'em reporters?" he leaned against the gleaming car, a ratty rag still in his hand.

"Jamie, you're dumber than a bucket of rocks" she insisted as he spun back to finish polishing the car. The hot sun beat against the polished red paint and Bonnie had to shield her eyes with her hand. Anyone would think they were getting ready to drive down to some parade or something and not the hospital to see Emily.

"Good job, son" Rudy praised him with a slap across his shoulder. Jamie flinched from the sting, but he feigned a broad smile for his father. Bonnie could tell that her brother still ached from his injuries but he wasn't letting on.

"You bringin that with you?" her father motioned to the teddy bear in Bonnie's hand as he positioned a sheet of newspaper on his car seat to form a barrier between him and the scorching heat of the leather seat.

"Yeah, this here's Ms Cuddles."

"Your old teddy bear?" Marcel asked as he hauled Emily's Barbie quilt into the backseat of the blue truck.

"Yup, I'm passing it down to Emily"

"You sure you can part with that ol' thing?" Grams asked, brushing past her on the stairs on her way to the Buick. She lined an array of lunchboxes along the dashboard, dishes like the crackling fried chicken she had prepared for Emily should she wake up. Sheila, her grams didn't want Emily feeding on soggy, tasteless hospital food when she woke up from the coma she had slipped into six days ago.

"Hey, she aint old!" Bonnie laughed "Besides, I reckon my sister need Ms Cuddles a heck more than I do right now" she said mounting her older brother's truck and resting her head on a coil of white rope. Marcel often used it to tow his truck when he got stuck someplace, that and the jumper cables under the seat. The truck was clean and smelling like pine because of the small cardboard tree dangling from the rear view mirror. It looked brand new, save for the dent on the driver's side from the courthouse incident.

X

When they reached the hospital, the doctors sprang for their daddy and spoke in low, soft murmurs in the corridor not far from them. Bonnie thrust her shoulders, trying to peer over her brother's heads

"What's happening?" she asked, jostling past Marcel but he blocked her path. With his shirt sleeves rolled up, he held onto Emily's quilt and Jamie stood beside him clutching a wilted bouquet of daisies.

"When can we see Emily?" Bonnie muttered, hitching herself onto Jamie's arm as her heart started its rapid pound against her ribcage. She didn't like the way the doctor raked his hand through his hair in an attempt to avoid Rudy's eyes or the way her grams shook her head as she tried to snatch Rudy's arm before he marched down the corridor bounding for a small room.

"Daddy?" she pleaded tearing away from her brothers and running down the hall to find her father. She ran blindly, hot and searing with her heart hammering hard against her chest, the pounding spiralling up her throat. Bonnie found him in a small room with sputtering lights that rushed past her as she lunged for the cot dodging her gram's feeble hold on her.

"Emily!" Bonnie sprang for her little sister's face. Emily's jaw was slack, lifeless eyes starring right up at the ceiling at them sputtering yellow lights. Bonnie's father was bawling, a soundless scream that emptied his lungs and left him sagging like a hollow man. Bonnie's own chest felt empty, like she had nothing left to give, no voice and grams sat there like one of those dolls made of straw with buttons sewn in where the eyes were supposed to be. She slouched against the stark white staring vacantly at nothing.

Bonnie hooked her arm around Emily's small shoulders, raising her head with her right hand.

"Em, "she gulped dead air into her lungs, "I brought Ms Cuddles for you. She's yours now"


	4. Chapter 4

**Someone to watch over me**

**#**

The rhythm of the music rushed from the screeching floorboards to the soles of her feet, surging through her muscles and coiling around her spine before shooting up to her chest. The room was hot and crowded, swamped with kinsfolk and church folk who had gathered to mourn Emily's passing. They sang and wailed like they could see Emily's soul tossing, spinning and humming before passing from this world to the next. They cried as though they were begging her to stay, praying for her to become one of them spirits that had bound themselves to Georgia by them cypress roots.

Bonnie wanted to scream, she wanted to yell '_run Emily run, keep on running and never look back cause this life sure did you wrong! _'Then the other part of her wanted to rope Emily in, hold on to her and plant her spirit deep in the rich soil outside her bedroom window so that she could sprout right up and look over Bonnie for the rest of her natural life.

She wriggled off the sweaty bench to kneel down and pray, Jamie's clammy palm pressed against her wet palm, fingers clamped around each other like ten vice-grips.

"_I sing because I'm happy, I sing because I'm free…"_

Bonnie pried one eye open to catch her father slouched inside the humming sea of kinsfolk, like he was dangling from some hanging thread looking empty and drained save for the small beads of sweat spurting from the skin on his forehead that verified he was still alive. Everything about him looked dead, from his slack hair follicle to the dead grey nails of his yolk toned fingers. Some people died with the dead, their own souls departed with that spirit from the sheer hurt of losing their soul mate.

"_His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches over me…"_

When the prayers were finished and condolences murmured over soft buttermilk biscuits and sweetened iced tea with lemon slices, Bonnie stole away upstairs to the attic to be alone with the nostalgia of her momma. She wanted to forget about the folks downstairs; forget about the funeral that was taking place in a few days. She wanted to amuse herself with the strange patterns of her gram's vintage lace dresses, old sepia coloured family pictures and the synthetic scent of her momma on her old wedding dress. No one had mentioned Abby, no one had hollered 'see, your daughter's dead, think I'll write it on a darn postcard' and whenever Bonnie asked or mentioned their mother she was met with scowls, grunts and snorts. She was starting to wonder if the woman even existed out there in balmy California or if she had been a figment of her fervent imagination like the postcards she'd written.

Bonnie dragged the trunk along the squeaking wooden floor and tucked herself in a dimpled red leather sofa with an elongated back. She rummaged through the tragic treasure of collected things, hunting through memories until she found her momma's battered tin box.

She undid the stack of postcards slowly like she was opening a delicate gift. She traced her finger along the words, cramped letters struggling to hop all over the paper. She pressed the mark of a spattered tear with her thumb before leafing through the bunch for another postcard and finding one with a blossomed coffee stain. The writing was different like a forgery of the last card. The postcards had lost their magic, they were just dull and heavy stacks of thick paper with no movement and no life or love. Pressing them against her nose, she closed her eyes and hoped to smell wild unbridled oceans and shuddering grass shooting up from grainy white sands. Disappointment knitted her brows when all the scent she caught was dust and mould from the recesses of the redwood trunk. She listened to the news about a protest in Hong Kong before she switched off her father's radio, this was it, life. Life wasn't dusty Moroccan streets in Africa or brooding beaches in Asia. Life was Emily lying cold and dead in a metal slab in a mortuary, gutted and empty.

xXx

Giuseppe's Range rover swung around the gravel driveway, wheels skewering against the dotted grey grit and yellow dust. As soon as Damon's sneakers touched the rutted ground, sweet heat moulded around his face like a thick cobweb, and magnolia clung to the walls of his nose and his sullied flesh. His spirited eyes followed the commotion of matted crowds, plates of food and the endless parade of flowers. His blue eyes wandered, widened and slanted until they caught something in the top section of the house. The window was half hidden behind big oak trees, branches clothed with violet Spanish moss. She stood inside the dank and dusty room like an apparition haunting the old house, chestnut brown hair rippling around her shoulders, her dress swirling like black dust in a Mongolian desert.

Once they were inside the house, Damon mingled with the crowd, shoving past them in an attempt to up the stairs to explore. He made light work of the creaking stairs as he climbed up to investigate the phantom that had flickered from the window like dust and fog. Careful not to stomp or shuffle around too much outside the door, his eyes made haste for the rusted keyhole and peeped inside. Pressing his soggy palm against the shedding wallpaper of flowered tendrils that crept up to the vanished ceiling, he flinched as the wall groaned under his touch.

He could barely see her behind the gauze of sweaty heat inside the room. She was a secret behind a melancholy of spider webs that were swept once every other week and so he screwed his eyes tighter to see her.

"Damon!" Stefan hissed through clamped teeth when he finally found his brother. He stomped his foot on the floorboard shaking his head and like a dog that had stolen an egg, Damon tucked his tail between his legs and followed Stefan back down the stairs. He swung his head back over his shoulder once to look at that door one last time.

xXx

Bonnie was standing at the vantage point from the attic window when grams called her to come downstairs. She approached the small crowd of polished white people with hesitation; they looked too cultured like they didn't belong around the soft vibrating gospel music of black folk or even around the swamps of Georgia. They were Charleston people, right down to their seersucker suits and imported cigarettes.

"This is Bonnie" her grams announced, stifling her shoulder with her arm. Bonnie shrunk back when Mr Salvatore drew a sparkling silver coin behind her ear and her fingers sprang up to rub the shell of her blushing earlobe. Her eyes stuck on his frightfully colourful tie and only leapt back when her grams said, "Bonnie, go and git your friends some sweet tea and biscuits"

"They aint my friends," she quipped, arms crossed over her chest and eyeing the boys up and down.

"Miss Bennett!" grams dug her nails into her shoulder "Take these boys out back for some biscuits this instance, you aint too old for a switch!"

Bonnie nodded, rested her chin on the indentation between her collarbones and examined the dusty scales of her sandals. The shoes were old, their pink colour faded two summers ago and all that was left now was the shrivelled pattern of their shedding scales. She clamped her teeth together and fixed her lips over them as tight as two crabs mating. Dodging her grams lashing eyes, she hunched her shoulders and managed to disguise the scowl on her face with the wide lace collar of her dress.

Then one of the boys spoke, in a soft hushed tone with his lips barely moving, "My name's Stefan and this here's my brother, Damon"

Bonnie's eyes sprung up to the boy standing next to Stefan. She remembered him from the steps outside the courthouse.

His blue eyes were playing dirty tricks, looking at her like he had second sight and could burst out all her secrets from this life, the last and the next. Bonnie shook her head, shaking the blood that was beginning to course up to her cheeks. She settled her gaze on Stefan's generous green eyes and relaxed to the harmony in them. She preferred him, favoured his bland brown hair and the pensive look on his face like a hitchhiker who perpetually stuck his thumb out to go somewhere, anywhere. He wasn't restless about his longing search for someplace, but rather patient and dream locked inside his nowhere.

"Well, come on 'en" Bonnie mumbled gesturing with her head toward the garden or what her family deemed to be the garden. This sentence, she expressed to the bashful dreamer while the other one lagged behind seemingly studying the way her dress leapt around her calves as she marched toward the rubber tyre swings and makeshift wooden table outback.

Moments later she was growing restless and Stefan was already lost in his dazed world of tyre swings and sweet tea as he whipped out a frayed sketchbook and began sketching something. Bonnie groaned and rolled her eyes as she stood up brushing dust off her dress. She licked hot dust off her lips before making her way out of the guarded yard. She scanned around for her brothers and uncles and everybody was too fixed on their own business to worry about her and so she trekked down the road, dust flurrying about her ankles as she marched. With a hasty halt, Bonnie whirled around to find the strange boy behind her.

"You following me?"

Damon shrugged his shoulders, swatting a black fly that was hovering too close to his pretty face.

"I'm going down to the river for some noodling; you can come with if you like" Bonnie spoke slowly as if she was talking to some seer child who didn't quite comprehend the magic of this world. Damon nodded and motioned toward his father's range rover with his chin. Bonnie pursed her lips and rapped her nails against her folded arms. It was bad enough communicating with the strange boy out in the open but she wasn't sure she could handle being alone with him in such an enclosed space.

X

Damon lay on the hood of the car, legs spaced out and head rested against his arms as Bonnie dipped her feet into the water. She was still clothed and so Damon shut his eyes because there was nothing to see beyond the shape of her sleek thighs in her Christian dress. After what seemed like only seconds to him, he awoke to her tolling shrieks, the burble of rough water and then nothing.

The river snarled, shrieked and gurgled. It whipped her bruised cheeks, tangled her hair, tossing her waif limbs like a rag doll in the yelping current. Bonnie clawed at the water, swallowed torrents of it before she felt something brush against her leg. Broad ribbed spine, slinking and twisting in the water like a river serpent.

"Alligator!" she mangled her scream, tongue twisted with the current as the water closed in hastily over her head.

xXx

Without a second thought, Damon dived in after her ready to fight a gator for her life. He swam frantically, eager stroke after eager stroke spitting and swallowing water until he got to her. Breaking the surface, they kicked savagely while she slurred something, squirting and spitting water. She was heavy pressed against his chest, waterlogged heaviness that seemed to drag her further into the depths of the river and closer to the circling gator. She thrashed out and coughed water while he kicked and struck the gurgling current, swimming for the both of them. They scrambled onto the shore, panting and coughing but had little time to rest when the gator bounded for them, big jagged jaws snapping and racing for their heavily drenched and aching limbs.

Crack-Zip-Crack-Zip-Crack-Crack-Zip

They both swung around to the sharp crack of a rifle, bullets snarled and zipped past Damon's leg tearing into the gator's hind leg. Damon flinched back, the noise ripped through his sinews, hastily turning his belly into knots. Tyler lunged forward, finger jerking the trigger for another snarl and then a spluttering zip and crack. The gator thrashed and kicked creeping back into the water as the last flying zip and crack of a snapping bullet hit it square on its spine spraying blood into the water.

"Darn it, I had him" Tyler screamed while Matt hollered like a banshee perched on the tailgate, screeching and guzzling a six pack of beer. The drenched couple was coughing, Bonnie's right arm draped around Damon's waist and his arm swung around her shoulder.

"Mattie, be a good boy and go seek him!" Tyler yelled, rifle cradled at his waist. Suddenly, the blond hurdled over the tailgate and rushed for the water, wading through it to hunt for the wounded alligator.

"You ok?"

"Yeah"

"You sure, Bon?"

She nodded vigorously, fighting through her coughs and her fright and still holding on to Damon's shirt.

"Mattie aint so crowded with brains though, aint that right?" she hollered, watching as Matt tackled the swirling water trying to wrestle the injured gator. He cackled loose and hoarse like a swamp witch, corn-coloured teeth lining his cavernous mouth. The gator snapped and snatched, invigorated by its familiar element and Matt leapt and screeched, whooped and with a gleeful gibber retreated back to the muddy shore.

Marching back to the three spectators with an ape like gait, he pressed so close to Damon's neck that he could feel his hot beer breath seething down his wet spine.

"What we got here 'en?" Matt praised; reaching for Damon's wet hair.

"Don't bother him, he's a mute!" Bonnie snapped through chattering teeth and hurled her green eyes at a soppy Damon.

"I aint mute" Damon scoffed rolling his eyes. The rotting smell of the swamp was persistent pushing up into his nostrils; pricking his eyes and making them water.

"Naw, this boy aint deaf an dumb. He just one of em stinkin rich Salvatore's" Matt chuckled, greatly delighted by this new turn of events as if meeting a Salvatore was good as discovering Big Foot. He sniffed his soaked armpit before crowding in on Damon, insipid blue eyes darting around Damon's tan face like a baboon looking to pick some nits.

"Salvatore, ha?" Tyler's face skipped into a broad smile, cheating the tension in his brown eyes "you probably reckon we just a bunch of dumb rednecks don't'cha?"

"You called it"

"Ya want me to kick your ass?" Tyler sneered, probing his ribs with the muzzle "Then keep talkin"

"Why don't I set my balls over there, make it a fair fight?" Damon challenged, driving his chest against the rifle. Tyler waited, his eyes digging into Damon's before he stumbled back and shouldered his rifle.

"What you know about a fair fight college boy?" he inquired keeping his narrowed eyes on Damon.

"Is this how y'all entertain company?" Damon looked from one boy to the next, his heart beat painfully against his chest and every single bone in his body ached but he refused to let on. It wasn't so much the fact that the redneck was holding a rifle as big as that gator itself but the fact that she was there to bear witness to these boys pissing all over him, and that he couldn't have.

"What of it? She's one of us and you aint got no right being here"

"It's a free country and last I checked she wanted me here"

"Yeah, I've known her since before she even had breasts" Tyler drawled, stomping the butt of his rifle on the ground. "What you know about Bonnie?"

"Don't you dare say my name, it don't deserve to grace your tongue!" Bonnie hissed, suddenly awake again. Tyler swung around to gape at her, his brown eyes startled and confused by her ambush.

"You're the last person I wanna talk to Tyler Lockwood", her bare feet squelched into the mud as she barked and snapped" your brother killed my sister!"

"I'm sorry about Em, I really am, ok?" Tyler growled right back, "I'm sore about it, hurtin worse than that gator right now"

"So, you believe he raped my sister?"

"I aint my brother's keeper, Bon" he pleaded, shaking his head.

"You the worst thing that ever happened to me Tyler Lockwood" she huffed, stomping toward the range rover "and I caint wait 'til they gas your damn brother"

"Don't say that, he still my brother"

"He's a monster, the whole lot of y'all are monsters!" she hollered slamming the door shut.

"Do us all a favour; keep your swampy paws off her" Damon swooped in on the attack.

"Or what?" Tyler grinned "You gonna send your lawyer daddy after me or maybe your Klan granddaddy?"

"Bonnie know about her new friend?" Matt chortled, nudging Tyler's elbow.

"Don't know what you're on about" Damon spat, jaw muscles kicking.

"Sure you don't"

"Ask yourself this Salvatore, who's worse between my brother and your granddaddy?" Tyler sniffed, stepping back to shoulder the rifle again "One is a poor soul who rapes little girls, the other lynches black folk"

Damon shook his head and shoved past him, he had to get away from the rednecks. He had to get away from their endless lies and fables. Sure, he loathed his family, thought them vile and sickening but to call them Klan members was a whole other ballgame.

"You think it's my fault?"

"What's your fault?" Damon asked looking at her.

"That my sister's dead, maybe if I hadn't been friends with Tyler…maybe if I'd spent more time being a big sister-then-"she stammered wiping her arm against her nose.

"T.S Elliot once said we die to each other daily, so death is really-"Damon began, pushing his hair back and wiping his wet forehead.

"Think I prefer you mute" Bonnie scoffed with a snort and fixed her eyes back on the marshy rutted road with thigh high reeds.

xXx

The day of the bail hearing came and the world didn't stop spinning. No flaming comet plummeted into Georgia, the laws of nature stayed the same and Bonnie watched as her father sawed wood in the backyard, sawdust fleeting and exhausting the torpid air. He was talking and joking with Jamie, Jamie with his tongue poking out between his pressed lips as he held the board for Rudy and Rudy with his glazed eyes looking at nothing. He was a walking, breathing corpse trying to jostle through the days leading up to Emily's funeral. He wasn't even bothered by the terrible racket them hogs made in their slippery pen.

Bonnie turned to watch as another one of her aunts walked down the stairs with a plate of cornbread smothered in beacon grease for her father. They were everywhere now, fussing around like plump headless chicken trying to keep the family busy cause maybe if they were too busy living then they wouldn't think about Emily.

An hour later, she chanced upon her father climbing into his car and setting his newspaper on the leather seat like an old ritual before he started the engine. She caught a flicker of a long barrel and the gleaming walnut butt of a rifle but thought nothing of it because everyone and their mother were packing since the courthouse incident. They called it their God given right to bear arms, her daddy called it democracy.

When he looked up and caught her gaze, his top lip curled into what would have been a smile if the action hadn't hurt him so deeply and so Bonnie took it for what it was and smiled back.

"Get away from the window, child" her grams said, her silver needle darting in and out of the black cloth, its silver metal glinting in the late afternoon sun. She was mending one of Jamie's Sunday suits for the funeral.

"A storm's coming soon" she said, studying the stiff dark cloth.

"A storm is always coming" Bonnie replied, rolling her eyes and fanning herself with an old magazine.

"The good Lord's lookin after Emily now" her grams moaned in a dry lowly voice disregarding her sarcasm "he'll be looking after all of us" she affirmed nodding her head.

Bonnie shook her head, shrugging off the feeling that her grams half expected her to yell Amen. She hated the religious talk, questioned how and why the _good_ Lord allowed all this nonsense to happen.

xXx

At exactly 5pm when the low haze of shimmering yellow dust flurried over everything inside and outside the house, when the cornflower blue sky changed its shade to a sombre grey with flashes of dull silver whenever lighting sparked, the police came to look for her father.


End file.
